The president’s Camp David Summit with members of the Gulf
Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, Oman, Kuwait and Qatar) was
supposed to reassure some of America’s most important partners in the Middle
East that Washington is standing with them during a period of unprecedented
tumult. But the pre-summit bombshell—Saudi Arabia’s King
Salman respectfully declined the invitation from the kingdom’s main
protector and patron—and post-summit communique—peppered
with platitudes about “a region that is peaceful and prosperous,” and empty
words promising “respect for all states’ sovereignty and non-interference in
their internal affairs,” and vacuous references to “no military solution to the
regions’ armed civil conflicts,” and vague legalisms about how Washington might
or might not respond to “an external threat to any GCC state’s territorial
integrity that is inconsistent with the UN Charter”—suggest that the gathering
neither helped the White House make sense of the Middle East mess nor helped the
Gulf monarchies feel more secure amidst the storm. As Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian
foreign minister, concluded, “Are the Gulf states going to go back from this
meeting feeling reassured? I would say the answer is no.”

In short, it seems both sides are confused: The Gulf states,
along with Jordan, Egypt and Israel, are confused about Washington’s response to
the region’s metastasizing crises—the Syrian civil war, the Pandora’s Box of
chemical weapons, the erased red lines, the rise of ISIS, the fracturing of
Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen along sectarian fault lines, the Sunni-Shiite
proxy wars in Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen, the expansion of Iranian
influence, the Iranian drive for nukes—and the administration is confused about
whom to support, what to do, where to engage, how much to commit.

One way to make sense of how to deal with today’s Middle
East is to borrow an example from medicine. Let’s say a patient staggers into
the hospital suffering from chest pain, labored breathing, a toothache and abdominal
discomfort. The ER docs would triage his symptoms: A heart attack would take
immediate priority over lung cancer, lung cancer would have to be addressed
more substantively and quickly than an ulcer, and the toothache would be the
least of their worries. In the same way, the United States and its allies must
address the worst problems first in the Middle East.

Priority #1: Defeating
jihadist terror

If President Bush’s “global war on terror” was too
broad, we now know President Obama’s war on “core al Qaeda” was far too narrow.

There are 41 jihadist-terror groups in 24 countries today—up
from 21 groups in 18 countries in 2004. Offshoots of “core al Qaeda” (based in Pakistan) can be
found in Yemen, Egypt’s Sinai,
Tunisia, Libya, Mali and Somalia. ISIS (a reconstituted, rebranded strain of al
Qaeda in Iraq decimated by the surge) has affiliates in Afghanistan, Libya,
Yemen and Nigeria. ISIS controls an area the size of Costa Rica and reigns over a population of 2
million. ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi calls on his followers to “erupt volcanoes of jihad everywhere” and
“destroy the idol of democracy.”

Defense Secretary Ashton
Carter describes ISIS as “the most
immediate threat to U.S. national interests.” ISIS, the president adds,
“threatens American personnel and facilities
located in the region” and “if left unchecked…will pose a threat beyond the
Middle East, including to the United States.”

Yet Washington’s response
is not destroying the cancer. The numbers explain why: Between August 2014 and March
2015, the anti-ISIS air campaign—Operation Inherent Resolve—hit 5,547
targets. That’s 23 targets per day. By comparison, the 1999 air campaign
over Serbia—though hamstrung by NATO infighting—averaged 138 strike sorties a
day. At the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, the coalitioncarried out 1,700 air sorties and
missile launches against Saddam Hussein’s regime on a single day. Last fall, the Syrian air force conducted 210 airstrikes in the span of 36 hours.

Max Boot of the Council on
Foreign Relations notes that it took 75 days for the U.S. military to topple the Taliban regime
in Afghanistan, with U.S. warplanes averaging 86 strike sorties per day. In the first 76 days of Inherent
Resolve, the United States averaged eight strike sorties per day.

The violence in Iraq and Syria has triggered a cascade of
crises that affect the security and stability of America’s most important regional
allies: Saudi Arabia is building a massive wall along its Iraq border, bombing
Yemen and arresting ISIS fighters by the dozens. Overwhelmed
by refugees, Jordan has been drawn into a dangerous and destabilizing military
campaign. Turkish territory has been violated by Syria. Israel has conducted
preemptive strikes into Syria. ISIS nearly overran Baghdad.

Destroying ISIS will help America’s regional allies feel
more secure. But any semblance of security gained from an ISIS defeat will be
lost if a) the Syrian civil war continues, b) Iran joins the nuclear club and/or
c) Iran’s current regime emerges as the regional hegemon.

Syria’s civil war, which served as feedstock for the rise of
ISIS, is now on par in length and lethality with the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Bashar
Assad should not be permitted to remain in power. But Washington’s “Assad must
go” solution to Syria died the moment the president agreed to Moscow’s plan to
disarm Assad, which elevated him from an international pariah into an indispensable
partner. It’s a grim reality that Washington is looking the other way—and
Damascus is getting
out of the way—as these two enemies attack their common enemy. (To add
insult to injury, Assad has continued
to use chemical weapons.)

Tehran’s expanding reach explains why Sunni Saudi Arabia has
signaled it will matchwhatever Shiite Iran does on the nuclear
front, why the Saudis are hitting back at Tehran in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, and
why Israel and Saudi Arabia are exploring ways to address a
nuclear Iran. This freelancing on the
part of longtime U.S. allies is largely a function of U.S. policies: The
president drew a red line in Syria but then failed to enforce it. He supported
the Mubarak government in Egypt,
then the anti-Mubarak protestors, then Morsi’s democratic revolution, then
Sisi’s autocratic counterrevolution. He put personality and politics ahead of a
strategic partnership in Israel. And his nuclear deal with Iran amounted to a surrender
of his own position.

“At present our friendship is not valued,” as Churchill once
said, “and our enmity is not feared.” That must change.

The
administration may believe Iran can be brought in from the cold. But the hard truth
is that the Islamic Republic is a revolutionary regime that seeks to
upend the regional order. Thus, it uses terror as a tool of statecraft, bankrolls
Hezbollah, supports proxies in Iraq, Yemen and Bahrain, threatens to close the
Strait of Hormuz, engages in piracy,
props up Assad, and gamesthe IAEA.

Sooner or later, Tehran’s advance must be checked. Toward
that end, the nuclear deal should be scuttled. “Nuclear
talks with Iran began as an international effort…to deny Iran the capabilityto develop a military nuclear option. They are now an essentially bilateral
negotiation over the scope of that
capability,” as Henry Kissinger observes. “The
impact of this approach will be to move from preventing proliferation to
managing it.”

Kissinger knows that while a
non-nuclear Iran is difficult to handle, a nuclear Iran may be impossible.

Priority #3: Nurturing
freedom

In his book “Conservative Internationalism,” Henry Nau
argues that promoting freedom has long been a tenet of American foreign policy,
and should remain so. But Nau contends that Washington should use its resources
“to spread freedom on the borders of existing freedom.”

Iraq is a democratic state, albeit a fragile one, bordering
a democratic state. Iraq’s freedom experiment carries huge symbolic
significance (see Baghdadi’s statements and Tehran’s actions). But keeping Iraq
within the borders of freedom is only part of the challenge. Washington should
encourage freedom-oriented reforms in the region, but in a focused manner.

For
example, Iraq’s Kurdish
Regional Government is not an independent state, yet it has embraced
democratic governance and is committed to building an “economically free area.” That should be a model for the rest of
Iraq. And perhaps postwar, post-ISIS Iraq can become a model for postwar,
post-ISIS Syria.

Jordan
ranks in the top 10 globally on economic freedomand has a growing commitment to the rule of law. Washington should focus on encouraging
reform in these areas. The UAE and Qatar are autocratic states. However, both
boast high levels of economic freedom. Properly incubated, that can serve as a
contagion for political freedom.

To be sure, these priorities—these courses of
treatment—are interlocking, even interchangeable. What’s telling is that none
of them are being fully pursued by Washington at the moment.